Mehran Elminia

“Sometimes doing 24 hours continual painting, the artist’s brush becomes a complete extension of his inner soul. His declared aim is to arrive at a state of ecstasy where all knowledge of the past is absent and he can achieve a total symbiosis with the moment. The visual complexity, richness of brush strokes and vibrant colours draw us in gradually so that it is possible for the viewer to attain an almost trance like state as we, little by little, enter the artist’s visual universe. The endless brush strokes create a further effect of staring into a spider’s web and losing oneself in a new and rarefied world.”

via First solo UK exhibition of the Iranian artist Mehran Elminia’s large-scale abstract paintings opens
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Jenny Saville

“…Painting is my natural language. I feel in my own universe when I’m painting. But, in Britain, there has been a drive in art schools to describe and to rationalise what it is that you’re making, and that is a death knell to painting. Painting doesn’t operate like that. It works on all the irrational things. If you stand in front of Willem de Kooning’s Woman, I, you can’t unravel with words how that works on you. In America, painting is embraced, perhaps because one of the last great moments of painting was in New York, with de Kooning and Pollock.”

Jenny Saville: ‘I want to be a painter of modern life, and modern bodies’ | Art and design | The Observer.

Roberto Matta – artnet Magazine

Roberto Matta, L’homme descend du signe, 1975, Courtesy The Pace Gallery

Roberto Matta at Pace Gallery by Donald Kuspit – artnet Magazine

In the prevailing philosophy of the Orient, the immeasurable (i.e. that which cannot be named, described, or understood through any form of reason) is regarded as the primary reality. . . . To Western society, as it derives from the Greeks, measure, with all that this word implies, is the very essence of reality, or at least the key to this essence, in the East measure has now come to be regarded commonly as being in some way false and deceitful. …more

via artnet Magazine

Martin Creed: ‘I don’t know what art is’

“I don’t know what art is. It’s a magic thing because it’s to do with feelings people have when they see something. If the work is successful, it’s because of some magic quality it has.”

via Martin Creed: ‘I don’t know what art is’ | Art and design | The Guardian.

a definition of formalism

Term for any approach to the arts, whether theoretical, critical or historical, that emphasizes the autonomy or primacy of formal qualities. In the case of painting, these qualities are usually understood to be compositional elements such as line, value, colour and texture: they can be distinguished from technique on the one hand and content on the other.  read full description

a definition of abstraction

Term used in an art context in several ways: in general for processes of imagemaking in which only some of the visual elements usually ascribed to ‘the natural world’ are extracted i.e. ‘to abstract’, and also for the description of certain works that fall only partially, if at all, into what is commonly understood to be representational.  MOMA defines the term Abstraction read full description

via Abstract Critical.

Unlocking the Mysteries of The Artistic Mind | Psychology Today

“The artist is, in a sense, a neuroscientist, exploring the potentials and capacities of the brain, though with different tools,” observes Semir Zeki, a neurobiologist at University College London and director of the Institute of Neuroesthetics. Picasso had an intuitive understanding of the mechanics of vision—which he expressed in his paintings. Likewise, the power of a Rembrandt self-portrait is not an accident: The Old Masters knew how to captivate the eye and the mind, which is why we still gaze at their canvases in museums. Scientists can learn about the mind by reverse-engineering art.

via Unlocking the Mysteries of The Artistic Mind | Psychology Today.

Impressionism: Art and Modernity | Thematic Essay | Heilbrunn Timeline of Art History | The Metropolitan Museum of Art

Impressionism: Art and Modernity | Thematic Essay | Heilbrunn Timeline of Art History | The Metropolitan Museum of Art.